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I wrote a linked list today, outside of a job interview. Systems programmers exist :'(
The hiring manager of a small software company gave me a quick brief before handing me off to his technical heavy. "He's hard to get along with, but he's really smart. Oh, and he has two PhDs. He'll tell you that." I was ushered in. The Guy with Two PhDs (he showed me his business card first, and there were indeed two PhDs on it) asked me: "What is the simplest way to synchronize two threads?" I rattled off some sync…
> I never found out the BEST way to share data between programs Come on, add another layer of indirection! When given a problem to solve, hand back another problem. In this case: Q: "I want the SIMPLEST possible way to synchronize two threads. What is it?" A: The SIMPLEST possible way to synchronize two threads is a global maximal element (not necessarily unique) of a poset induced by a partial ordering on possible m…
What a fun interview it would be to actually do this. My favorite interview was for an architect position, where my two future peers took turns telling me horror stories about working there, to see if I would run away screaming. I got the job and only ran away screaming 18 months later.
I gave them my solution, but, well, my interesting in that company has gone.
I've actually used (politely, of course) many of these answers in interviews, whenever I felt the interviewer was trying to show off or read from the script instead of actually judging my abilities. "I'd google it. Anything less would be a waste of our time." That cuts through a lot of bullshit. After saying that at my last interview, we got into actual problems (structuring a program, building an API, writing code t…
Maybe I was just ahead of the times or they weren't looking for someone to be as honest as I was but I didn't make it past round 3 of their interviews.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
linked list is not complex for christ sake.
> linked list is not complex for christ sake. There are many people for whom this is complex, you're assuming a foundation that not everyone has. There are also many people for whom nothing is complex, they assume they can understand everything, while they don't currently, they assume they'll be able to learn it without issue. Dealing with new starts who are straight out of education is often like reading posts from…
The hiring manager of a small software company gave me a quick brief before handing me off to his technical heavy. "He's hard to get along with, but he's really smart. Oh, and he has two PhDs. He'll tell you that." I was ushered in. The Guy with Two PhDs (he showed me his business card first, and there were indeed two PhDs on it) asked me: "What is the simplest way to synchronize two threads?" I rattled off some sync…
> I never found out the BEST way to share data between programs Come on, add another layer of indirection! When given a problem to solve, hand back another problem. In this case: Q: "I want the SIMPLEST possible way to synchronize two threads. What is it?" A: The SIMPLEST possible way to synchronize two threads is a global maximal element (not necessarily unique) of a poset induced by a partial ordering on possible m…
Thats hilarious. I was once interviewing for a C++ position and the interviewer presented me with some C code with a broken "swap" implementation and a driver function and asked me to fix it. I simply prefixed the call to swap with "std::". He wasn't very happy about it. ;-)
Hired. Seriously that's the correct answer as far as any productive engineer is concerned right?
using std::swap
swap(a, b)
I've actually used (politely, of course) many of these answers in interviews, whenever I felt the interviewer was trying to show off or read from the script instead of actually judging my abilities. "I'd google it. Anything less would be a waste of our time." That cuts through a lot of bullshit. After saying that at my last interview, we got into actual problems (structuring a program, building an API, writing code t…
new java.util.HashMap()
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I never found out the BEST way to share data between programs. In fact, I'm still looking. I think we all are. Copy-paste.
See, I was gonna go with Data.txt in a shared network drive. Btw = if you're worried about conflicts - it's Ok there's a second file called "writeStatus.txt" which you have to claim by replacing the String NULL with your processId - thereby claiming write access to data.txt and causing any other processes to Thread.Sleep until it's free. Unrelated, who's hiring...